One of China’s oldest activists still challenging nation’s leaders

While younger activists work within the existing legal framework, an older dissident who still remembers the Mao years uses civil disobedience as a weapon

By Carol Huang / AFP, JINAN, China

When Chinese police beat elderly former professor Sun Wenguang (孫文廣) so badly they broke four ribs, it was just part of the price he has paid for a lifetime defying authority.

The white-haired, soft-spoken Sun first went to prison nearly 50 years ago and is now one of China’s oldest activists, admired by the younger generation for his doggedness.

He turns 80 next month, but still persists in simple acts of protest, dodging minders in a risky game of cat and mouse.

“I am, in their view, a bastard who just won’t stop,” he said, chuckling in, his study late one night after his monitors had left. “If my rights are infringed then I have to fight back. I can’t just give up my rights.”

Sun is kept under regular surveillance by Chinese authorities, with a round-the-clock guard posted at his apartment at sensitive times.

During the trial of former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secretary for Chongqing Bo Xilai (薄熙來) in his home town of Jinan last month, a minder planted himself directly outside the door to prevent it even opening.

It was the sufferings caused by Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) disastrous 1958-1961 Great Leap Forward and 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution that turned Sun, then a university teacher of physics and economics, against the CCP.

Like many he was branded a “counter-revolutionary” and locked in makeshift campus jails.

However, he refused to admit wrongdoing and posted signs at the university entrance defending himself and others being punished.

When one was torn down he would post another, sending him to detention twice more for three years total.

“Whenever I was let out I would write,” he said. “They used to say about me afterward, whoever is down, Sun defends.”

For seven years from 1974 Sun was detained in labor camp and prison after he was convicted of being a counter-revolutionary — giving him more time to ponder the country’s problems.

“How could society be improved, the situation be changed, to avoid producing so much suffering in the future? I couldn’t stop thinking about this,” he said.

“If the nation and society have such huge problems and you only try to solve your own, it won’t work.”

When Sun was released in 1981, China had begun to open up, only to massacre the Tiananmen Square democracy protesters in 1989.

Every year Sun tries to outwit his minders to mark the June 4 Tiananmen anniversary, and the death of then-CCP general secretary Zhao Ziyang (趙紫陽) who was ousted after sympathizing with the demonstrators.

It was his attempt to honor Zhao in 2009 that provoked the vicious beating. He sneaked past guards swarming his building and made it to a park before being dragged aside and thrashed.

“Even with lots of people around that didn’t stop them,” he said.

Undeterred, Sun escaped his guards ahead of the Tiananmen anniversary this year by going out for a swim every day until they stopped bothering to follow him.

That freed him to meet friends on an agreed date and quickly unfurl a banner in public.

“Seeing this of the older generation of activists is a huge encouragement,” said Hu Jia (胡佳), a prominent Beijing-based dissident. “Professor Sun — for both his thinking and his actions — is an icon for Chinese dissidents.”

Sun has poured his political views into books criticizing CCP rule and advocating free elections.

His 2002 collected essays were scribbled in jail, some on toilet paper with a reed plucked from his straw bedding and dipped in soy sauce.